Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806 [volume 7]

Source:

Thwaites, Reuben Gold (editor). Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, 1804-1806. Printed from the Original Manuscripts in the Library of the American Philosophical Society and by Direction of Its Committee on Historical Documents, Together with Manuscript Material of Lewis and Clark from Other Sources, including Note-Books, Letters, Maps, etc., and the Journals of Charles Floyd and Joseph Whitehouse, Now for the First Time Published in Full and Exactly as Written. (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1905). Volume 7.

Pages/Illustrations:

555 / 9 (6 of tables)

Citable URL:

www.americanjourneys.org/aj-100g/

Author Note

Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809); William Clark (1770-1838)

For a thorough summary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition's historical
context and itinerary, and short biographies of both Clark and Lewis,
see the 44-page introduction by the journals' editor, Reuben Gold
Thwaites, in volume one (AJ-100a). For other documents related to
the expedition, see AJ-090, AJ-097, AJ-140, AJ-146, AJ-147, and
AJ-160.

Document Note

At least seven members of the expedition are known to have kept
journals. One, by Sergeant Patrick Gass, was rushed into print in
1807. The others were turned over to editor Nicholas Biddle who,
succeeded by Paul Allen, used them to produce the official History
of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark
in 1814 (also online; see below). Biddle deposited most of
the journals at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia
where they lay untouched for decades. Seventy-five years later Elliott
Coues had them transcribed during work on his 1893 edition of the
Biddle-Allen text, because he hoped to also produce an edition of
all the journals. Other pursuits intervened, however, and the publisher
engaged Reuben Gold Thwaites, superintendent of the Wisconsin Historical
Society, to edit all the unpublished Lewis and Clark journals for
the first time.

Thwaites, who had already edited many other historical documents,
discovered hitherto unknown journals and included scientific notebooks
that had never before been published. His eight-volume edition enabled
three generations of scholars to gain countless new insights into
Lewis and Clark. Thwaites did not find everything, however, and
the first complete edition of the journals, prepared according to
modern editorial standards by Dr. Gary Moulton for the University
of Nebraska Press, was published in thirteen volumes, 1983-2001.

Note on the Illustrations

We have given here the text pages of the first seven volumes of
Thwaites' edition (1904-1905), supplemented with additional illustrations.
The Thwaites edition consisted of 750 “trade” copies illustrated
with facsimiles from the Lewis and Clark manuscripts, and 200 “deluxe”
copies illustrated with additional reproductions of paintings by
Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), who journeyed up the Missouri in the 1830's.
Bodmer's paintings originally appeared in Maximilian, Prince of
Wied's Reise in das innere Nord-America in den Jahren 1832-1834
(Coblenz: J. Hölscher, 1839-1841). We have scanned the
manuscript facsimiles from the trade edition, but replaced the deluxe
edition's Bodmer copies with scans taken directly from the original
nineteenth-century Bodmer prints. Images missing from the Wisconsin
Historical Society collections have been omitted from our digital
edition. Finally, we have not reproduced the atlas volume of the
Thwaites edition because so many Lewis and Clark maps are already
online at the Library of Congress American Memory project (http://www.loc.gov/ammem/).

Other Internet and Reference Sources

The literature on Lewis and Clark is immense, both in print and
on the web. For an online summary of it, see the 1904 bibliography
by Victor Hugo Paltsits in document AJ-100a, pages lxi-xciii. This
should be supplemented by The Literature of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition: A Bibliography and Essays issued by Lewis and Clark
College in 2003, for twentieth-century publications.

The official report of the expedition, Nicholas Biddle’s 1814 History
of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark,
to the Sources of the Missouri, Thence Across the Rocky Mountains
and Down the River Columbia to the Pacific Ocean, is online
at the Library of Congress “meeting of Frontiers” project at
http://frontiers.loc.gov/intldl/mtfhtml/mfsplash.html.

Other documents relating to the expedition are part of its "Louisiana
Purchase Legislative Timeline" at
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amlaw/louisiana5.html. These include
the House of Representatives report on the "Explorations of
the Western Waters of the United States" by Lewis and Clark,
various acts to compensate the explorers for their labors, and documents
concerning their appointments as governors of Missouri and Louisiana
after the expedition.

Two web sites built as part of the Lewis and Clark Expedition bicentennial
also contain helpful information and links. The U.S. government's
site at http://www.lewisandclark200.gov/
is a cooperative venture of 32 federal agencies. The non-governmental
National Council of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial is a joint
effort by historical societies, Indian nations, scholars, businesses
and all other interested parties; its web site is at
http://www.lewisandclark200.org/.